


the world matters nothing

by Philyra912



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, Getting Together, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Post-Season/Series 15, post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27583384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philyra912/pseuds/Philyra912
Summary: “Sam says we get to write our own stories now. That we’re finally free to make our own choices. And that’s what I’m choosing, Cas. To be that man, the one you died for. And that man wouldn’t leave you alone in the Empty. He’d fight for you, to get you back to the world you love so much. That’s the first thing I chose, now that I can choose things. I chose to find a way to get you back to us.” He swallowed hard. “To me.”
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester
Comments: 15
Kudos: 426





	the world matters nothing

**Author's Note:**

> “I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!”  
> ― Oscar Wilde
> 
> I don't even go to this school!!
> 
> I've been watching Supernatural since the pilot, since I was a sweet summer child who didn't know any better. By the time I stopped publishing fanfic, Destiel wasn't even a THING because CASTIEL wasn't even a thing (if that gives you any idea how long it's been since I posted a story). But I have followed the fandom in the background all these literal decades, and I have shipped Destiel for 12 fucking years. The fact that it became canon was such a shock to my system that I actually finished a fic and felt like posting it, which is a miracle unto itself. 
> 
> Welcome to my post-s15e19 fix-it/coda. It is unbetaed. It is basically just the unfiltered ramblings of my subconscious. I hope they all get the endings they actually deserve, but just in case, here is a thing.

After they watched Jack walk away through the world they’d saved together and into somewhere else entirely, Dean slid behind the wheel of the Impala and felt Baby settle in around him like an embrace. He was aware of the chassis dipping as Sam folded himself into the passenger seat, heard the tuneless screech of metal as the doors swung shut, watched his brother’s chest rise and fall, miraculous, still here. All his sensory inputs seemed to be in working order, but inside he felt strangely blank, full to bursting with air and light and absolutely nothing else, weightless, a hot air balloon more than a person. Instead of thoughts - about Jack, about Chuck, about anything at all - his head contained nothing but white noise and “it’s finally done.”

Sam was silent beside him, and for a while they sat there, staring through the windshield at a world that had been empty of everyone but them less than an hour ago. The enormity of what had been lost and what had been restored registered only in a distant, intellectual way. When Dean turned to look at him, Sam’s expression was placid, full of that same buoyant blankness that crowded against Dean’s ribs, and he was struck all at once by how many lines were carved into his little brother’s face, by the way sunlight caught in the silver beginning to thread through his hair. Sam was almost 40. Sam was going to grow old. 

Dean cleared his throat, and Sam turned to look at him. In that moment, Sam was all at once the baby Dean had carried out of a burning house, the toddler who had taken his first steps in a shithole motel room with only him to bear witness, the jagged-edged, furious teenager who had left him alone in the highway world, the 22-year-old who had climbed into the Impala beside him while the life he’d carved out of the world with bloodied hands turned to ash in the rearview mirror, the man who’d stood before God today with a smile on his face and blood on his teeth, leaning into his brother, holding him up. The helium-bright void in Dean’s head offered up no words he could say that could even begin to describe that, so instead, he turned the key in the ignition and felt his lips curl into a smile that usually gave him a 50-50 shot of getting exactly what he wanted or getting himself punched in the face.

“What we need, Sammy, is some tunes.” He pulled the battered box of cassettes up onto the bench seat between them. “What’s the soundtrack for the beginning of the world?”

Sam’s grin was blinding, like sunlight reflecting off chrome. 

“Driver picks the music,” he reminded Dean amiably, settling back against the seat with his elbow out the window. 

“You’re damn right he does, bitch.” Dean’s fingers found a cassette with an ancient strip of tape along the A-side, the ink long since faded to a grayish stain where the words “Songs for Long Drives to Nowhere” had once been inscribed in Dean’s own scrawling hand. It slid into the tape deck like a key into a lock. 

“Jerk,” Sam murmured beside him, and even though his eyes were on the road, Dean knew he was smiling. 

“Okay, Baby,” Dean said quietly, running a hand over the steering wheel as Jimmy Page’s first few notes tumbled out of the speakers. The gear shift under his fingers felt like an extension of his arm; Sam’s breathing from the passenger seat was steady, familiar, the metronome of all of Dean’s many lives. “Take us home.” 

The world they’d saved (really saved, saved forever, this time) rolled under the Impala’s tires, and they didn’t speak again the entire drive back to the bunker. Dean’s head still felt like it was full of a bright, nameless thing with wings, with no room at all for anything else. 

The blissful, uncomplicated blankness (relief, Dean realized later, the word for that golden, weightless sensation was relief, so huge and profound it had blotted out everything else like an eclipse) began to ebb back like a tide the second they swung open the door of the bunker. They had saved the world, and that was good, but they had saved the world because there were people in it, people they loved, and that was so much worse and so much better. They shared a look that was half-guilt, half-hope, and they both went scrambling to their rooms to collect the phones they had shoved in nightstand drawers days ago, letting the charges run dry. An empty world had been hard enough to bear without staring at blank screens, hoping against all reason that they would ring. 

When Dean jammed the charger into his phone, he found himself staring at the loading screen with hope so keen it felt like a knife, terror so encompassing it was almost comforting, like an old blanket. The second his phone kicked on, it was flooded with so many messages he couldn’t follow them as they scrolled past his desperate eyes. He gave up trying to make sense of them immediately and just started calling people as their faces crowded up into his memory. 

Bobby picked up on the 3rd ring, asked him where the hell he’d been, listened silently to Dean’s recap of events, and then gruffly called him an idiot and a hero before hanging up on him. Jody let him talk to each of the girls in turn without making him ask (he would have asked, he would have done anything, but he felt warmth like good whiskey in his veins that he hadn’t had to). Charlie answered the phone laughing, spent the entire call laughing, and hung up laughing, Stevie’s laughter in the background alternately dissonant and harmonic, like untuned bells. His call to Donna went straight to voicemail, but down the hall he heard Sam chuckling, saying something about a diner just north of Clearlake on I-35 that was about halfway between Lebanon and Stillwater, and felt the feral panic that that seized him when he’d walked into the bunker and reality had crashed back in finally begin to abate. 

Dean spent the next half hour responding to texts that had come in during that long, silent drive with his brother, while the people in the know had been frantically trying to figure out how they had gone from flesh and bone to dust and back again, what the Winchesters had done this time. Sam’s voice had faded down the hall as he’d wandered out into the rest of the bunker, so it was silent by the time Dean shot off his final response, and then stared down at the phone in his hand. He had opened his contacts, and had his finger hovering over one, last name.

Jack had restored everything Chuck had taken. He’d told them so, and Dean believed Jack, believed in him, with the kind of faith he’d never had before in his life. Dean thought of all the beloved faces that had flashed into his mind’s eye, and how he had known, in his marrow, that they would be there to pick up when he’d called them. He knew with the same bone-deep certainty that the one voice he wanted to hear the most, the one he had saved for last, was not going to rumble into his ear if he pressed “call.”

He pressed it anyway. He had pressed it dozens of times in the days between Chuck’s snap and the moment the phone got shoved into a drawer to die with the rest of the world, and every time it had done what it did now, what it was always going to do: ring, endlessly, with no one on the other end to pick it up. 

Grief welled up like a wave of black venom in Dean’s chest, threatening to drown him. Billions of people dusted by Chuck, billions of people restored by Jack, but one who had gone of his own accord, one final act of rebellion. The world was miraculously full again, but Dean was suddenly on a different planet, as empty and barren as the Earth he had wandered with Sam and Jack during the in-between time. 

Dean sat with that pitch-dark ocean of grief for a few minutes, letting it wash through and above and around him, while the phone rang over and over in his ear. He had done this once before, alone on the floor, pinned down beneath the black-hole gravity of the place in the universe where Cas had been and was not anymore. That day, the feeling had been too big and too starfire-hot to even look at it directly, burning his retinas like staring into the sun, and he had simply closed his eyes against it, curled in on himself, and let it crush him under its weight. He’d thought about just staying there, letting the world end without him this time, but words had started to filter through the howling sound inside his head. I cared about the whole world, because of you. The thought of being anyone other than who Cas had died to save was so monstrous that the tidal pressure of his loss retreated in the face of it, and Dean had found the strength to stand up, to not give up on the world Cas had loved so much, to not let him down this one, last time. 

Dean took a deep breath, forced the suffocating swell of sorrow back down, and went to find his brother. 

He wandered through the bunker, trying not to think about anything at all, ducking his head into various rooms, but didn’t find Sam in any of them. Eventually he made his way to the library, and was about to turn back around when it was clear it was empty, but his gaze fell on the table and he paused. 

Three sets of initials seemed to nearly glow in the amber light of the lamp, like the sigils they both were and weren’t. Dean thought about how, sitting on his bed, sitting on that stone floor, and trying to climb out from under the impossible weight of his grief, his first thought had been about getting back to his family. He pulled the pocket knife out of his jeans and let himself remember the last time it had been used, the last hand to hold it, while he worked in the quiet light. 

Some time much later, after Dean had been staring down at his handiwork in silence for a while, Sam finally wandered into the room, sand still on his boots from the shore where they had faced down God himself. Dean had thought before this moment that he knew every expression his brother’s face could make, every twitch of an eyelid and every shadow along his jaw, but this one was brand new.

“Sam?” Dean asked cautiously. “You ok?”

“Yeah,” Sam replied, blinking slowly. His voice sounded strange, shivery and hollow and yet somehow bright, like a bell waiting to be struck. “It’s Eileen. She’s . . . Jack brought her back. She wants . . . She’s driving now, should be here by the morning.” He smiled, like the sun coming up. “Dean, she wants to stay.”

“That’s great, Sammy. Eileen ... you could have a life with her. A real life, like the one you always wanted.” He was so happy for his brother he could barely breathe around it, and the light of it shone too brightly for the black sea in his chest to rise up against it, even though it wanted to. Sam’s smile faltered a little, and he drew in a shaky breath.

“She wasn’t supposed to be here, Dean,” he said in a rush, like a dam bursting. “She wasn’t supposed to be anywhere, not like Bobby or Charlie. She was supposed to be dead. I was so afraid that Jack had put everyone back where they were supposed to be.” Dean got up from his chair and moved around to his brother to put a bracing hand on his shoulder. 

“We’re making our own choices now, Sammy,” he reminded him firmly. “We’ve earned that, and we’ve earned whatever life we can make for ourselves. If you want Eileen in yours, then she’s supposed to be here. Gotta have a little faith, man.” Sam’s mouth wavered but the corners tipped up, and he nodded. Then he glanced down at the table, saw what Dean had carved into it, and then snapped his eyes back to Dean’s. 

“I tried calling Cas,” Sam said carefully. Dean felt his face do something he had no control over, and was vaguely aware of Sam’s hand coming up to his own shoulder. It felt like another brand. 

“Yeah, me too,” Dean managed to choke out, wondering why the words came out of his throat sounding like they were formed of broken glass. “But he didn’t get dusted, Sam, he went out on his own terms. Jack said he was gonna be hands off, just put things back the way they were before Chuck went all Thanos on the world. Guess it might have been too much to hope for, to get him back, too.” 

“How did he go out, Dean?” Sam’s eyes were flitting over his face, studying him like there were clues in his margins. Even though he hadn’t told Sam, hadn’t told anyone, about what actually happened in those moments before the Empty pulled Cas away, he wondered as he looked up into Sam’s melancholy face if he might have guessed. It wouldn’t surprise him if he had, if Sam had known what Dean hadn’t even let himself look at sideways before Cas stared him down with Death at the door and made him look it right in the face. Sam knew Cas and Dean better than anyone else in any world, and Sam was smart, so smart, the best and smartest person Dean had ever known.

“I told you, man. Billie was breathing down our necks. Cas summoned the Empty to stop her, and it snatched him up too.” Sam’s brows furrowed, his eyes narrowing.

“How did he summon the Empty?” Sam pressed. Dean wanted, suddenly, to tell him all of it. He wanted to pour out every word Cas had said to him and see if they made any more sense to Sam than they had to Dean, who hadn’t been able to process it then and couldn’t now, not without feeling like he was ripping himself apart from the inside, bleeding internally. He wanted to see if Sam could explain it to him and make it anything other than one more fucking tragedy. 

“Not yet, Sammy,” Dean heard himself say hoarsely. “I’ll tell you about it, I will. But not yet, ok?” Sam looked like he was going to argue the point, and panic forced more words past the howling thing at the base of Dean’s throat. “Please. I’m not . . . I’m not ready.” He could feel tears pressing behind his eyes and ruthlessly choked them back. Sam looked like he knew exactly what Dean had just confessed to, but he also didn’t look very surprised. Mostly just fragile, and sad. 

“Yeah, Dean,” Sam agreed softly, squeezing his shoulder tighter. “I do want to know, someday. But . . . when you’re ready.” Dean cleared his throat, looked away from Sam’s too-shrewd gaze, and stepped away to give himself a little space to breathe.

“You know what we deserve right now, Sammy? A fucking drink. Be right back.” He escaped to the kitchen, and by the time he returned with two beers, he felt less like he was coming apart at the seams. 

He sat beside his brother in the quiet, and proposed a toast that seemed both too small for the moment and exactly, exactly right. Then he listened to Sam talk about writing their own stories, and thought about what it meant, to be free. By the time they went off to their own rooms to sleep before taking whatever step came next, Dean thought he knew exactly what to do now, finally free to choose. 

The next morning, Dean was up with the dawn. Sam’s bedroom door was still closed, but he knew he’d be up soon. Eileen would be there in a few hours’ time, and Dean knew when to make himself scarce. He showered off the dust of saving the world, threw a few things in his duffle, and left a note in the library that he’d be back for dinner. He tried to tie in a pun about rockin’ and knockin,’ but he lost the thread. Not his best work. 

He and Baby drove aimlessly for an hour or two, taking in the world. Eventually, he realized where he was going, and wasn’t even that surprised. He should have known, really, that there was nowhere else this particular chapter of his story could have started. 

The barn, when it finally came into view through the windshield, looked, if possible, even more dilapidated than it had the last time he’d seen it, 12 years and a few lifetimes ago. The fact that it was still standing at all seemed to be more a product of wishful thinking than structural integrity. He pulled the Impala to stop and simply stared at it for a while, before summoning the courage to get out of the car and start walking toward it.

He stepped inside, and it smelled like dust and rot and ancient motor oil, nothing at all like ozone, or snowy mornings, or green growing things. He didn’t know why it made him sad, but it did. The sigils on the wall had faded with age, but he could still see them. They made it feel like home. 

He walked up to the rickety table he’d been sitting on right before the first time Cas had stared at him with that unblinking gaze he could feel like a physical touch on his skin. Carefully, he put one hand down on it, felt the dust and grit beneath his fingertips. Eventually, he looked up at the burnt out light fixtures, never replaced in the decade and change it had been since Cas’ fledgling understanding of his vessel had busted them up. 

“Hiya, Cas,” he said quietly. Cicadas buzzed in the field outside, and a truck rumbled past on the highway in the distance. “I don’t reckon your ears reach all the way here from the Empty, but . . . Crazier things, right?” He smiled, and thought he should feel stupider than he did, talking to an abandoned barn. “So listen, I just wanted to let you know: we won. We beat ‘im, Cas. Well, Jack did. You were right about the kid. He was everything you always said he was, that Kelly knew he could be. And he’s like, God now, or whatever. So I guess we should all be glad he had you around, to raise him up right.” Dean swallowed hard, and set his hand down more firmly on the table, like it might ground him. 

“And you were right, too, about me. I’m not what they thought I was, Cas, not any of them. I had a chance to kill Chuck, to pay him back for everyone he hurt and everything he did. He was powerless at my feet. He asked me to. And I didn’t. I didn’t, because I knew you thought I was better than that.” Dean felt the tears he’d been fighting off since the lakeshore flood back, and decided to let them, just this once. “You changed me too, you know. Before . . . before, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I would have been every bad thing they ever thought I was.” 

“So look. Here’s deal, ok? I still don’t think I’m the man you were talking about that day. I still don’t think I deserved to be saved, not by you, not if it meant you going to the Empty. But, I want to be. I want to try to be what you said I was. I’m trying, Cas.” He was only vaguely aware of sliding to the floor, his back against the table now, like a puppet with its strings cut. 

“Sam says we get to write our own stories now. That we’re finally free to make our own choices. And that’s what I’m choosing, Cas. To be that man, the one you died for. And that man wouldn’t leave you alone in the Empty. He’d fight for you, to get you back to the world you love so much. That’s the first thing I chose, now that I can choose things. I chose to find a way to get you back to us.” He swallowed hard. “To me.”

“And about the rest of it.” This part felt harder, more painful, but it was the kind of pain he knew from when he poured alcohol over a knife wound, or Sam slammed his shoulder back into its socket. Something cleansing, a pain that meant the pain was almost over. “What you said. People who . . . people who care about me. They don’t make it. Caring about me is a one way ticket to being collateral damage, but me caring about other people . . . that’s when the shit really hits the fan. Because I don’t get to keep what I want. Sam’s the only thing, the only person, I’ve ever been able to keep, and we almost let the rest of the existence go up in smoke to keep each other. I need him with me, need him to be whole and healthy. But I want you with me, Cas. I think it might be the first thing I’ve ever really wanted in my whole life.”

“So when you said what you said, that last day . . . I didn’t know how to be someone who could take it. But I’m working on it, ok? By time I get you back, I hope I’ll be . . . I hope I’ll be able to say it back. Like I should have said it then.” He choked on something, realized in a detached way that it was a sob, didn't care. “Because I do, Cas. I do, ok? I choose to.”

“Jack said he doesn’t want to put himself into the story, that we don’t have to pray to him anymore. And I respect that, I do. But also, I’m done asking for things. Every time we’ve lost you, I’ve gone begging to other people to get you back for me. This time, I’m going to get you back myself. I’m going to tear the Empty part with my bare hands if I have to, to get to you.” The words finally ran out, and Dean felt cored, hollowed out, but clean, and new. “So anyway. I’ll see you soon, Cas. Just hang on until I get there.”

“Dean.”

For a long, long minute, Dean kept his eyes forward, staring at the faded sigils on the walls. He felt like he was standing on a precipice, about to look down the see he was standing on nothing at all. 

“Cas?” 

“Yes.” The word sounded like a smile, and Dean felt it in his bones. 

“How?”

“Jack. He came to the Empty. It was out of balance, bulging with malignance, the opposite of peace. It was supposed to be a place of endings, not of torment. So Jack came, to make things right. And even though he’s . . . what he is now, he’s still Jack, underneath, and he still loves us, perhaps to his detriment. He found me there, and told me he wanted to give me what he’d given you: a chance to choose.”

“To choose what?” Dean finally found the strength to turn his head, and there he was, windswept and weary, and Dean was too overwhelmed to even weep. 

“He said I could stay there, put down my burdens and rest, after all this time. Or that I could come to Heaven with him, to sit as his side, be restored to my former power, be the shepherd I always hoped to be. But . . .” Cas smiled now, with his eyes only, but Dean still felt it like a wash of sunshine on his face. “But I told him that, if I could truly choose, I would choose to go home. To you.”

Dean stood up on limbs that didn’t feel like his own, took a few tentative steps toward the door where Cas stood silhouetted by the afternoon sun. 

“I was coming for you, Cas.” He felt like it needed to be said. “I chose you, too. And I was going to fight for it.”

“I know,” Cas smiled for real this time. It was the brightest thing Dean had ever seen. “I heard your prayer. But Dean, you’ve fought enough. You can lay down your arms, now, if that’s what you want. You may have to fight again, if you choose it. But I . . . I am already yours”

Dean wouldn’t remember, after, crossing the distance between them, but Cas was suddenly there, his arms like bands of steel around Dean’s back, anchoring him to the world they’d saved. Dean’s mouth found his hair, his temple, the shadowed dip at the hinge of his jaw. 

“This is real,” Dean said, not quite a question. 

“Yes,” Cas’s voice rumbled over his bones like the Impala over the highways of the world. “Dean . . . The choice I made. It was a human life I was choosing, not an angelic one, and I made that choice before I heard what you said. I chose it knowing it was finite, and that the thing I truly want . . . that it might not be mine, to ask for. You . . . you don’t have to. I’m staying, in whatever capacity you’ll have me. I chose it. There are no strings.” 

“They don’t feel so much like strings, when you choose them,” Dean murmured. He discovered that his hands had tangled into the rough, dark strands of Cas’ hair without his permission, but he decided to lean into it. He pulled back and pressed their foreheads together, consciously, on purpose. Because he wanted to. 

Cas sighed, and Dean felt it against his lips, like a revelation. 

“I’m so glad,” Cas breathed into the space between them. “To be home.”

“We aren’t home yet,” Dean argued, his eyes closed and his vision full of light. 

“Yes, we are,” Cas replied, tightening his hands on Dean’s hip, on his shoulder. 

In the end, it was the easiest thing in the world, to press forward, to slot his mouth against Cas’ like it belonged there. It was so, so easy to choose, now that he knew what it meant, to not have a choice. 

It wasn’t always easy. There were days, in the decades after, when Cas’ obtuseness annoyed the fuck out of him, when Dean forgot to go to the store, when Cas left mostly-drained cups of tea all over the house, when Dean was an asshole for no reason whatsoever and they ended up screaming at each other before Dean took Baby out for a drive to cool off.

But mostly, it was. It was waking up beside Cas’ gentle snoring. It was Sam and Eileen’s kids running rampant through their backyard, trampling Cas’ carefully-tended vegetable garden while Cas chased after them, beaming like the sun itself. It was Cas in the kitchen, a phone between his shoulder and ear while he talked some green hunter through the intricacies of smoking out a rugaru, Dean pressing a kiss to the juncture of his neck and shoulder while Cas smiled at the wallpaper. 

It was so easy, in the end, to choose.


End file.
